What if there was a better way to talk to all your friends than through a thousand different messaging apps on a thousand different platforms?

What if you could just find the show you wanted without browsing through infinite tiles in a hundred different streaming apps?

What if you could have all of your stuff everywhere without dealing with some crummy user interface on some unknowable file sharing platform?

This month on the Vergecast, we're looking into connectivity. How we talk to each other, how we talk to our stuff, how we find things online.

All this month, on the Vergecast, available wherever you get podcasts.

It's Rico Daley. I'm Adam Clark Estes.

And if you caught yesterday's episode, you know that a bunch of world leaders are in Glasgow this week at the COP26 climate conference.

They're trying to figure out how to pump the brakes on carbon emissions.

We meet with the eyes of history upon us, and the profound questions before us.

It's simple. Will we act? Will we do what is necessary?

Will we seize the enormous opportunity before us?

Or will we condemn future generations to suffer?

China is the number one polluter on the planet, and the United States isn't doing much better.

It's second, the EU and India, they're up there too.

But even if all humans stop putting carbon into the atmosphere in the future, we still have to answer an important question.

Who's responsible for all the carbon that's already stuck there? You know, the stuff that's destroying our planet.

The short answer is the rich countries of the world, that maybe even the shorter answer is the United States above all others.

That's David Wallace Wells from New York Magazine. He and our friend, Sean Ramaswaram, at today explained are going to take it from here.

We have about 2,500 gigatons of carbon that's been put up there, and about 500, a little more than 500, has been put up there by the US, which means this one country, the richest country in the world, is responsible for about 20% of all historical emissions, which all together are the reason we're in the bind we're in today.

We're not in the bind we're in today because of India and China's future emissions, although we need to take care of them.

We are where we are now because of what's happened in the past because those emissions are still functionally heating the planet.

And I think this sort of sets the stage for why you wrote recently a cover story for New York Magazine titled the case for climate reparations. What's your case?

...